As COP28 takes place, the building industry continues to demolish and to build new. As cyclical and detrimental this may be, an abrupt end to building completely is a difficult solution to propose with more than half a million architects practicing in Europe alone (ACE, 2022). As industries, those of architecture and software development are about as dissimilar as they get, but where they align is their abundance of repetitive processes. Take the design process for example: it is repeated across contexts, as are (in the broad scheme of things) details and material applications.
Despite being well accustomed to sharing architectural details, its true that in today's context, these can be limiting (especially due to their format, lack of relevant data such as fire performance), not to mention the increasingly critical Global Warming Potential (GWP) per m2 figure. As one of Europe's largest EPD libraries (Global ABC, 2023) sharing and making accessible an ever increasing quantity of material data, we asked ourselves:
How might we involve the industry?
How might we enable the industry to leverage its embodied labour (that which has already been performed)?
Introducing our Building Element Library, where we've partnered with some of Denmark's leading organisations to kick-start (with more to follow!) such as Havnen's Haender, 3XN, NREP, Vandkunsten, CREEBuildings, DBI, CEBRA and ERIKarkitektur amongst others to demonstrate how our database can be used not only as a source of data, but as a source of inspiration.
Where possible, we've mapped all materials to our database, including Fire Performance and Total GWP (A1–A3), with the ambition of expanding these to cover all LCA modules as required by the Danish BR. Our building element library is currently in beta, but growing rapidly.
Interested in contributing? Send us an email at hello@revalu.io with 'building element' as the subject.
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